On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 5:13 PM, <userbeit...@abwesend.de> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 18 2015 at 10:54pm, dmccunney wrote: >> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: >>> But 3(b) in the GNU GPL says source code should be available up to >>> three years after they download the binary, upon request.
>> The problem is that this is generally taken to mean "The source that >> produced the particular binary the user has", so that the user can get >> the source, reproduce the build environment, and create a duplicate of >> the binary they have. >> >> Since the state of the source in an open source product is variable, >> current source may not build, let alone duplicate the user's binary, >> so you can't just point at the development repository when people >> inquire about source. >> >> If you keep older binaries around, the source that produced them is >> more or less required. Your practice looks like the best compromise. > > Excuse me for interjecting, but doesn't a source repository do exactly > that? If I get GitHub correctly, you can go back to any moment in time > and download the source as it was at this particular moment. Github can indeed do that. Unfortunately, the whole world isn't under Github in particular or git in general. There's a lot of code still under CVS. SVN, BZR, HG, and other things. (Eric S. Raymond wrote tools to lift stuff out of CVS repositories and export to something else [*anything* else...] and is trying to stamp out CVS, but it will take a while.) > The question is: why not use e.g. GitHub for FreeDOS related sources? Effort involved? Given the diversity of sources, this would require Jim or someone to create a FreeDOS repository on Github and add all of the various projects that are included in FreeDOS to the repo. (And as a matter of courtesy, agreement by the authors of the programs to this move would be nice, assuming they are still around to provide permission.) Effort would also be needed to make clear entry points to the sources to produce given binaries, because the user looking for the source may not be familiar with git. (An effort elsewhere I'm following is an attempt by a former Busybox maintainer to replace Busybox with something called Toybox, with Android as a target. (One of the Android devs is a heavy committer. Android is using something called toolbox internally, and he wants to replace it. The Toybox lead prefers Mercurial as source repository, and has fulminated about how gort does various things...) If you are willing to undertake the fairly massive effort involved, drop Jim a note... ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
